570
PARTISAN REVIEW
Custine, well-known in a world more and more rarified for
Aloys,
le
M onde comme il est
and
Ethel,
M. de Custine, the creator of
the
ugly young girl (that type so envied by Balzac), had delivered to
the
public
Romuald ou la Vocation,
a work of sublime ineptitude,
in
which some inimitable pages make one both condemn and absolve
its dull and awkward stretches. But M. de Custine is a subspecies of
genius, a genius whose dandyism mounts to an ideal of negligence. All
this gentlemanly code of honor, this romantic enthusiasm, this good–
natured raillery, this absolute and nonchalant personal attitude are
not understood by the great human herd, and this delicate writer
had against him all the bad luck which his talent deserved.
M. d'Aurevilly had violently attracted people's eyes with
Une
Vieille M aztresse
and
l'Ensorcele.
This cult of the truth, expressed
with a frightful intensity, could not be anything but displeasing to
the crowd. D'Aurevilly, a true Catholic, evoking passion to conquer
it, singing, weeping, and screaming in the storm, planted like Ajax on
a rock of desolation, and seeming always to be saying to his rival–
man, thunder, God, or matter: "Destroy me, or I will destroy you!"
...
[Baudelaire proceeds to characterize various other now forgotten
novelists of the period.]
But the rich talents of the author of the
M ysteres de Londres
and of the
Bossu,
any more than those of so
many other unusual minds, were unable to achieve the quick and deli–
cate miracle of this poor little provincial adulteress, whose whole his–
tory, without embroidery, is made up of sorrows, disgusts, groans,
and some few feverish swoonings wrung from a life canceled out by
suicide.
If
these writers, some turned toward Dickens, others modeling
themselves after Byron and Bulwer-Lytton, too highly gifted perhaps,
too contemptuous, did not, like a simple Paul de Kock, know how
to crash the gate of Popularity, the only one of the bawds who in–
sists upon being raped, it is not for me to blame them any more than
it is to praise them. Nor do I see any reason for being grateful to M.
Gustave Flaubert for having accomplished at the first stroke what
others seek all their lives. At the most I will discover in him a super–
ogatory symptom of power, and I will attempt to define the reasons
which made the author's mind move in one direction rather than in
another.
But I have also said. that this situation of the late-comer was
bad; alas, for a lugubriously simple reason! For several years the
amount of interest which the public allots to the things of the mind
had extraordinarily dwindled; its budget of enthusiasm went on
